Jack is in bloom

Our unpretentious Jack-in-the-Pulpit, or Arisaema triphyllum, in bloom on May Day, 2012. We transplanted this one a couple of years ago (with permission) from a farm in southern Roane County, West Virginia, to our backyard in Clarksburg. This is the first spring it has bloomed.

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April Nears the End

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. – T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” The land was not dead after the warm winter, and the lilacs appeared early. Through several weeks they brightened the yard, then gradually faded, then shrank, then [...]

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The Catalogue of Dwarfs

I discovered the other day that the past Sunday, 25 March, had been declared “International Tolkien Reading Day”. I don’t know who declared the day, but it seemed a significant event in some sense, and I marked it in my own small way. In the course of the day I happened to be talking to [...]

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Confetti

Strange weather, a strange day. Wind chimes ringing in the frigid air, a covering of dark clouds interrupted by drifts of clear sky. Sudden bursts of wind blowing fragments of fluffy white, confetti cut from a box of tissues or shaved from a block of ice, blotting out the sky, as in the final scene [...]

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An Early Spring?

In a year of little snow and unusually warm winter temperatures, spring seems to be ready to arrive in Clarksburg earlier than it has the past few years. Last October, startled by Clarksburg’s very early first snow of the winter, I thought we were going to have another long, snow-filled season, perhaps longer, colder, and [...]

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Spring Lake, Summer and Winter

Once upon a time a stone quarry sat near the north bank of “Kyte Crick” as it curves around the south side of Rochelle turning westward toward the Rock River. From as early as the 1840s blocks of limestone cut at this site were hauled away to become foundations for buildings, sidewalks, and gravel for [...]

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Sunday’s Visitor

Our yard, our neighborhood, much of Clarksburg and surrounding area along the West Fork River is filled with large, old trees — almost a mixed hardwood and conifer forest, even though we are in town — and many of the normal animal residents of such forests can be seen, at least from time to time, [...]

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Autumn Chores

Part of what I did last Saturday. I raked the leaves onto a tarp, then hauled them to a depression in the hill that we have decided to fill, gradually, with leaves and clippings in hope of its becoming black compost. Then we planted the last of the new bulbs for this year — 50 [...]

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2011-11-02, or, Fun With Calendars

It’s a palindrome, if you just take out the second dash — 2011-1102. Or you might prefer the US standard format — 11/2/11. I might be too easily amused.

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Scarecrow

Years ago my then very small daughter said that she wanted a scarecrow. We were living in our first house in Austin, and actually had a more-or-less functional garden at the time. I thought about it for a while and decided that there was no reason not to. I had an old, worn out flannel [...]

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